Abstract
Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. M. Blechman and M. Breaugh (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)
With the much anticipated translation of Democracy Against the State, the first book of Miguel Abensour’s to appear in English, an entirely new readership will have the opportunity to introduce themselves to the work of one of the most compelling, yet relatively unknown figures of contemporary continental political thought. Published in France in 1997, La démocratie contre l’État offers a rigorous, highly original and deliberately heterodoxical reading of Marx’s enigmatic allusion to ‘true democracy’ in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (1992: 88). Through a detailed investigation of the early Marx, Abensour extracts and cultivates a dynamic conception of democracy which is not only irreconcilable with the state, but remains antithetical to it.
One of the more prolific followers of Claude Lefort, Abensour’s self-described project of critical political philosophy at once provides a comprehensive critique of totalitarianism while intersecting a radical democratic politics with a self-reflexive notion of utopia inextricably bound to emancipatory struggle. For Abensour, political liberation remains inseparable from a persistent critique of modes of domination. In his many writings, these predominant themes are explored through a series of critical engagements with the thought of Levinas, Benjamin, Arendt, Machiavelli, William Morris and others, some of his most essential essays collected in the anthology Pour une philosophie politique critique (2009). While deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School himself, as editor of the important series ‘Critique de la politique’ (at Éditions Payot-Rivages), Abensour has often been credited with introducing many of the major works of the Frankfurt School to France.
Although a slender volume, Democracy Against the State arguably represents Abensour’s most ambitious work. Composed as a thought experiment which reintroduces Marx to a Lefortian theory of democracy grounded by an explicitly Machiavellian conception of the political, Abensour’s conclusions will no doubt encounter resistance from more orthodox readers of Marx’s political writings. Against dominant interpretations of Marx which identify politics as a consequence of a privileged socio-economic relation, Abensour discovers a tendency in Marx’s thought which locates the political, rather than the economic, as the dimension constitutive of humanity (16). Perhaps most unequivocal in the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, this ‘unknown Marx’ will discern the essence of the political, its real subject, contrary to Hegel, not in the absolute sovereign of the state, but in the entire demos itself (44). It is for this reason that Abensour claims that Marx belongs, in J. G. A. Pocock’s terms, to a Machiavellian moment. For Abensour, Marx’s pre-1844 writings rediscover the autonomy of the political first articulated by Machiavelli, a realm of division and plurality irreducible to theology and morality and inextricably bound to a project of civic humanism, political equality and a participatory public life. Accordingly, Abensour understands the struggle for democracy as a struggle for the political realm itself, a struggle intent on preventing the state, as a unifying, organizing principle, from becoming abstracted or alienated from the self-determination of the demos. Thus, Abensour wishes to remind us, and rightly so, that just as a theory of political alienation precedes Marx’s infamous economic alienation delineated in the 1844 Manuscripts, a developed theory of the political, very much in the spirit of Machiavelli, precedes Marx’s turn towards political economy and a universal history of class antagonism. Indeed, for Abensour, 1844 is the year that marks the beginning of a long period in which the autonomy of the political is to be eclipsed in Marx’s thought, a period that will stretch nearly three decades until the events of the Paris Commune force Marx to reconsider the political in its own terms once again in 1871.
For those concerned with extracting a more radically democratic Marx, perhaps there is no passage in his entire oeuvre more significant than the one in which Marx declares, at the heart of his critique of Hegel, that in a true democracy the state disappears. To be certain, this true democracy is not reducible to the centralization of the means of production or the withering away of the state under communism (xii). Nor is Abensour satisfied with Marx’s own description of true democracy as the identity between form (constitution) and substance (the whole demos). Rather, Abensour takes Marx much further. Abensour reads true democracy as the perpetual exercise of reduction, of reducing the constitutional objectification of the state and returning it to its original ground, the self-instituting demos itself, so that the constitution of the people is prevented from becoming detached and autonomous from its collective instituting body (43). Following Abensour, in true democracy, what disappears is in no way the political dimension itself, but the state as an abstracted form, a universal, determining authority, a whole that dominates its parts (65). Thus, through this unique Marx–Machiavelli intersection, Abensour is able to dissociate the idea of democracy from the domination of the state and bind it to the constant struggle for political emancipation. For Abensour, democracy is never simply a constitutional form, but represents the always possible emergence of human struggle (100).
But what makes the English edition of La démocratie contre l’État the definitive edition is the generous inclusion of a number of prefaces and an important appendix which frame the core text according to the author’s concept of democracy as insurgent democracy. While the appendix provides the most detailed analysis available of Lefort’s intriguing, yet often obscure, notion of savage democracy, the prefaces, originally composed for the Italian and the second French edition of La démocratie contre l’État, critique and elaborate this idea into Abensour’s own conception of insurgent democracy. Not inconsistent with his reading of Marx, Abensour’s insurgent democracy will be characterized by a permanent insurrection against the state. Insurgent democracy both resists the state’s neutralization of democracy, its programme to integrate democracy into a state-form, and, at the same time, opens up a space for the direct action of the people (xxxiii–xxxiv). It represents the irruption of the demos in order to establish a state of non-domination and to extend the project of democracy to all spheres of social life (xl). And yet, however dynamic and transformative, Abensour does not intend insurgent democracy to remain incompatible with all forms of institutions. Unlike Jacques Rancière, who often struggles to reconcile his own concept of democracy with an enduring institutional framework, Abensour explains that insurgent democracy’s relation to institutions must be selective, engaging only in institutions that promote direct political action and structurally preserve a relation of non-domination (xxvi). Here, it is the role of insurgent democracy to prevent such institutions from collapsing into a closed, bureaucratic, or hierarchical structure in which the organs of power become broken from the people once again.
A well-edited and extremely well-translated volume, Democracy Against the State is a major contribution to the debate on Marx’s ever-evolving political thought. For those new to Abensour, Max Blechman’s insightful Introduction will help elucidate his theses and contextualize the work within Abensour’s larger theoretical project.